Everything that I had done — and Michel too with his damned memory maps — was too two-dimensional. Too flat. Like this fucking landscape. Memory is repetition. Sure. But it is repetition with a difference. It is not recitation. It is repetition that creates a felt variation in the way things appear. Repetition is what makes possible novelty. This is what Mark E. Smith meant. Memory needs to be imagination. Transfiguration. Now, I saw it. The whole thing. An endlessly re-creating, reenacting memory mechanism. A rotating eternity. Self-generating and self-altering.
We do not make ourselves. We cannot remake ourselves through memory. Such was the fallacy driving my memory theater. We are not self-constituting beings. We are constituted through the vast movement of history, of which we are the largely quiescent effects. Sundry epiphenomena. Symptoms of a millennia-long malaise whose cause escapes us. Memory theater cannot be reduced to my memory, but has to reach down into the deep immemorial strata that contain the latent collective energy of the past. The dead who still fill the air with their cries. The memory theater would have to immerse itself in the monumentally forgotten. Like a dredging machine descending down through the lethic waters of the contemporary world into the sand, silt, and sludge of the sedimented past. I had seen a machine like that once on the Essex coast. I watched it for hours. Dredging mud. The clanging noise it made. Water slipping through its metal teeth.
The problem with my memory theater was that it was a theater of death and it would die with me. What was the point of that? The new machine would continue forever. Forever repeating. Forever innovating. Not just the same. It would be an artifice, sure, a simulacrum, undoubtedly, but infinite and autonomous. Its autonomy, not mine. Not the same mistake again. It would be the perfect work of art. It would continue without me, in perpetuity. Endlessly. Eventually, it would be indistinguishable from life. It would become life itself.
~ ~ ~
I had to begin again.
Somewhere else. Somewhere remote. This place was no good. Isolation. An island, perhaps. But which one? There are so many (wasn’t I from an island?). At the very least I would need a contained environment. Somewhere small. It would involve a huge amount of work. This would not be another static memory theater, but a living machine whose power would be generated by the constant ebb and flow of tides. Moon powered. I began to make little drawings in crayon for a kind of cinematic projection system. I needed to find visual, moving analogues to the entirety of world history that could be projected onto a specially prepared landscape. This would be a kind of garden, but with all the trees stripped down to expose their roots and a specially prepared black grass on a series of narrow terraces that would progressively soak up the projected images. And then project them back. Paradise. But in reverse. An Eden containing all that falls. Long after my death, all the elements of world history would combine with this garden and form an artificial but living organism. I could see it very clearly. A machine that would use history to generate nature. It would be like a second fictional sun in the universe. Finally, it would become the true sun.
It was dawn. Light rain. Dull. I rode my bicycle into Den Bosch and waited for the local library to open. 5:00 a.m. Four hours to wait. I needed to consult tidal charts.
a partial glossary of potential obscurities
A1124
An “A” category, single carriageway road that connects the towns of Colchester and Halstead, both in Essex, England.
JEAN BEAUFRET (1907–1982)
French philosopher, notable for his prominent role in the French reception of Heidegger’s thought.
JAMES BROWN (1680–1748)
Citizen of Earls Colne, Essex, England.
GIULIO DELMINIO CAMILLO (1480–1544)
Italian philosopher, known widely for his memory theater, which was described in the posthumously published l’Idea del Theatro.
TOMMASO CAMPANELLA (1568–1639)
Important Italian philosopher best known for his utopian treatise The City of the Sun.
THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881)
Hugely influential Scottish philosopher. Sartor Resartus (1836) is a scathing and immensely funny satire on German idealism and a fascinating philosophy of clothes.
CARNEADES (214–129/8 BCE)
Skeptical philosopher and head of Plato’s Academy. He was known for his very loud voice.
CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (1150–1224)
Christina Mirabilis from Sint-Truiden (now in Belgium), who was miraculously revived at her funeral and continued to perform wonders, such as levitating, surviving fire, and surviving drowning. She lived for nine weeks by drinking only the milk from her own breasts.
C.H.Z.
Continuously Habitable Zones (2011), an artwork by French artist Philippe Parreno (1964–) that figures subliminally in Memory Theater.
JOHN DEE (1527–1609)
Mathematician, navigator, proponent of English expansionism, adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, and Hermetic philosopher.
DUNDONIAN
Inhabitant of Dundee, Scotland.
THE FALL (1976–)
A mighty pop combo from Manchester, England, led by Mark E. Smith (1957–).
MARSILIO FICINO (1433–1499)
Founder of the Platonic Academy in Florence, translator into Latin of the complete works of Plato and coiner of the expression “Platonic love.”
ROBERT FLUDD (1574–1637)
Astrologer, mathematician, and cosmologist, whose memory system may find an echo in the architecture of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
FRANCES THE CAT (1995–2014)
Elegant, beautiful, and fastidiously small, Frances was part Oriental, part mongrel, and her good looks were a result of that fortunate combination. Born in Sydney, she emigrated to New York and liked the city. She adapted quickly, spending a number of nights on the tiles, but looked no worse for it. She could be tough on her prey, whether large pigeons, frogs, or lizards. Frances had no time for dogs, or indeed other cats. She proved that refinement is compatible with immense affection and warmth. The protagonist fuses Frances with the cat Jeoffry, the dedicatee of Christopher Smart’s poem Jubilate Agno, composed during confinement for insanity in London between 1759 and 1763.
FULKE GREVILLE (1554–1628)
1st Baron Brooke, poet, biographer of Sir Philip Sidney, adviser to Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. Stabbed to death by Ralph Heywood, his servant.